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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Umair Haque has one of the best quotes I've read in a while (I want to stick it on the office wall): "One common misinterpretation of management theory goes thus: pit your best people against one another, like dogs in a fight, and the wondrous power of 'competition' will unleash vital energies heretofore unseen in the history of great endeavor. Taking a hard look at the organizations that practice this style of management-by-Mordor, my guess is that the unbridled exaltation of aggression is more like the express train to Sociopath City." Instead, he points the way to genuine innovation by focusing on enlighted organization and on problems that actually need solving. "Profit is a solved problem: we know, to a pretty good approximation, how to make companies profitable... Work fewer people harder, with faster, smarter robots — and hey, presto: productivity. And that seems to be, sometimes, our entirely inadequate recipe for national prosperity — one destined to doom the middle class to even more striking levels of hardship and penury."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 07:56 a.m.

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